As is known in the art, optical transceivers are used to transmit and receive data. As is also known in the art, one type of transceiver is a small form-factor pluggable (SFP) transceiver; a compact, hot-pluggable optical transceiver used in optical communications for both telecommunication and data communications applications. It interfaces a network device mother board (for a switch, router or similar device) to a fiber optic or unshielded twisted pair networking cable. It is a popular industry format supported by several fiber optic component vendors. SFP transceivers are designed to support SONET, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and other communications standards. The standard has expanded to SFP+ to support data rates up to 10.0 Gbit/s (that include data rates for 8 gigabit Fibre Channel, and 10 GbE).
As is also known in the art, one application for an SFP transceiver is in a data storage system wherein a host computer/server is coupled to a bank of disk drives through a system interface. Here a bank of disk drives and the host computer/server system are coupled together through the interface. The interface includes “front end”, directors (or controllers) and “back end” disk directors (or controllers). The front end”, directors (or controllers) and “back end” disk directors (or controllers) include, among other things, protocol translators for, in the front end directors, converting between the protocol used by the host computer/server and the interface and for, in the back end directors, converting between the protocol used by the disk drives and the interface. The interface operates the directors in such a way that they are transparent to the computer. That is, user data in the host computer/server is stored in, and retrieved from, the bank of disk drives in such a way that the host computer/server merely thinks it is operating with one large memory.
In one such data storage system, the user data passes between the host computer/server though optical transceivers such as SFP transceivers.